


so much time

by tunafish



Category: Football RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-15 04:34:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13605639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tunafish/pseuds/tunafish





	so much time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raumdeuter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raumdeuter/gifts).



Philipp has been thinking about it for a while, during idle moments when it doesn’t interfere with anything important and yet still feels like an unnecessary indulgence: the way Pep’s hand always seems to find its way to the back of his neck, curling there, fingers pressing just so against skin and barely ruffling up into his hair. It’s perfectly safe in front of all the cameras in the world (he would never expect anything less) and he’s certainly been greeted and congratulated in exactly the same way a hundred times before Pep ever left Spain by teammates and other coaches alike, a hazard or benefit of his stature. There’s something else here, though, invisible, unvoiced; he knows it like he understands where the next pass is coming from on the field, like what’s going on between them, him and Pep, is a game in more than metaphor.

The sheer safety, normality of it means it’s not a violation of the one rule he’d laid out -- no _distractions_ during the season -- and yet, here he is, thinking about it again as he soaks in the ice bath, the ghost of a touch still lingering on his nape. Turning it over, one angle to the next: the way Pep touches other people; the interview from last week; an intercepted glare from Mourinho; the slight confused furrow in Basti’s brow as Philipp re-explained a suggestion that hadn’t quite translated; the memory of other hands sliding over his skin through the years: Thomas, Basti, Miro. Timo. 

It feels like only seconds before the others are clattering in, Thomas pausing a moment too long in the door to look at him and getting a joking shove in the back for it. Once he’s finished complaining and settled in, he leans over to Philipp and asks, straight-faced, “What paper should I be reading?”

“Hmm?” Philipp says.

“You’re planning something and I want the news,” Thomas says, “You can’t lie to me, Captain, I know that face. So? What is it? Are you taking over another club? Another sport? The government? Let’s see you do the Raute first. No? Don’t tell me you’ve decided to go after the cookbook industry--”

“Dressage,” Philipp says, stemming the flow of suggestion. Thomas makes a gremlin’s face at him and he shrugs. “I’m not planning anything,” he says, “Just thinking about the game.”

Except, suddenly, he is.

It’s not as far-reaching as Thomas’s imagination casts it, to be sure, and it starts as only the idea of a reversal: to reach up and touch back in the same way, to brush his own fingers across the crisp fold of Pep’s dress shirt and gauge his reaction.

He doesn’t begin with that: in some ways it’s too early, in others simply too obvious. At the bottom of everything, when you take it all right apart to the bones, to make really stick, you have to let them realize for themselves that there’s only one viable option. The game is only in arranging it so that option is the right one -- and the real challenge is that he’s almost certain Pep knows how it’s played, in a way that everyone else has been naive -- even Thomas, for all his joking shrewdness. That makes it a more even, a more interesting match, now that Philipp has something, a real goal, to play for.

So he starts slow: he pulls away from Pep’s sideline hugs a fraction of a second slower, he alternates between praise and standardized normality in post-game interviews, he smiles, he waits; he watches Pep do the same, matching without mirroring.

When Pep invites him to _talk_ at the end of the season and he accepts (graciously, attentively, only mutual understanding to give them away) he almost laughs about it, because it’s the first thing Pep’s done that he _wouldn’t_ have, and only manages to control himself because Thomas is just within earshot and has only just stopped nagging Philipp in favor of bothering Javi. He glances over, involuntarily, as if something in his hindbrain wants to make sure that Thomas hasn’t developed telepathy behind his back.

Pep follows his eyes and smiles a little wider, then clasps Philipp’s arm -- not quite rising above his shoulder, not yet, and says, “A good season.”

This time, he doesn’t step away until Pep lets go on his own.


End file.
